


A Smoking Gun

by Andian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Non-Graphic Violence, Suicidal Thoughts, reference to suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-06
Updated: 2014-04-06
Packaged: 2018-01-18 09:19:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1422838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Andian/pseuds/Andian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a reason Mary had become the person she used to be and that reason had been a gun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Smoking Gun

She still has the dream. Even now, even with John beside her, warm and calm, an arm wrapped around her, snoring slightly.

They is no color in her dreams. Not even the blood has the decency to be red, to be real, to be anything but something that she could have just made up, the distance between the was of her dreams and the is of her reality a contrast so sharp it seems like a lie.

She does not believe that she is crazy though. Not for a moment. Knows to well how it feels to hold a gun, to hold in her breath, to aim and then, finally, to shoot.

She rarely missed, back in the days -and how she hate the phrase _back in the days_ , hates all that it tries and fails to contain- always got the job done in the end despite, or maybe especially because of, the sudden appearance of obstacles.

It is hard to remember her last job. It is a blur after awhile. Whoever says that they remember every person they have ever killed is a liar or has never gotten to the point where their bodies became cardboard targets through the scope, just a grotesque form of trapshooting, just an attraction at a cheap carnival.

She tries not to think about her mother during those time, about her mother's hands that had seemed so fragile and thin and that could dismantle a hunting rifle in less than a thirty seconds. Her mother had worked at a carnival during her youth, just one summer, and her voice smelt like candy apples and tasted like cotton candy whenever she talked about that time and later on heavy and bittersweet like the wine that made her hand shake too much to dismantle the gun any longer. The past, she realized early, had a tendency to catch up on you and never let you go again. Especially a past that smelt like cotton candy and tasted like candy apples, filled with fire-breathers whose eyes had the same color as her own.

And sometimes she is at a carnival when she looks through her scope and hears the sound of a single gun shot on a winter day, echoing through a house that had long stopped felling like home. 

Just as it was during one of her last missions, the one she remembers in her dreams, monochrome and silent, black and white and filled with blood that looks and feel like tar, slowly drowning her.

Through the scope of her rifle Vicente Loera looks like a insurance agent, annoying and pushy maybe, but probably a nice guy if you get to know him closer. He does certainly not look like one billion dollars worth of cocaine and heroin, smuggled over the border every year. Like four dead policemen, found with only two heads overall. Like burning cars in front of houses of politicians working on stricter anti-drugs laws. But people seldom look like that and she has seen even worse people before. 

She slowly breathes out, trying to calm her own beating heart so that she can take the shot. He is wearing a white suit and part of her, distant and never really quite there, thinks that it is a pity to ruin it. 

Then she shots. The cardboard cut out becomes human, briefly, a fleeting moment as the blood paints patterns in the air. Death in slow-motion, pure ugliness with no lie of any beauty that could be found in it.

She starts feeling for her bag, ready to put away her gun and get away when she notices the movement where the now dead Vicente Loera had fallen down.

The girl is also wearing white and it's all she sees in the two seconds she freezes before her instincts kicks in.

She only allows herself to think about it when she's on the plane back, far away from Vicente Loera, who won't be able to hurt anybody anymore, far away from the girl, who might have been a hostage, the kid of a servant and the lies have never tasted as bitter as they did on this day. 

The girl had been wearing white and she wonders if there is red on her dress now, splatters that won't wash out and if in one irrational moment that she will later hate herself for she is going to be angry at her father for ruining her dress with his blood. It is so hard to wash out blood, out of white dresses or white shoes that were the whole pride of a little girl and that would be thrown away by concerned uncles and grim looking aunts. 

For the first time since she can remember, the sound of the gun shot just stopped and her own gun is heavy in her hand, as she stares at the ceiling of the hotel room she has booked in. She puts it away and reaches for the bottle of vodka instead. The gun is still silent when she finishes it.

Three missions later she disappears, somewhere close enough to São Paulo and it becomes a blur.

She is does not think about that time, the time between the CIA and London. Before was she almost always sure that she was killing bad people. Now the silence of the gun is deafening, a hole inside of her, a part of her missing, and there are days where she longs to replace it by the sound of another gun shot. She arrives in London before that, another city, another country, just another job and she is hard pressed to remember what or who exactly. It is raining too, which is probably why the taxi loses control and crashes into the bus as she is waiting for the light to turn.

There is chaos, there are people screaming and while there are so many reason that she is a bad person, she starts running immediately. Some struggle as she tries to pull them out of the burning bus, others just stare at her with glassy eyes and she wishes she had an first-aid-kit because there is a blood on her coat and its not hers. 

“Let me through, I'm a Doctor.” She has heard many military voices in her life and that one is no exception to them. A man, suddenly next to her, a grim look on his face as he looks at her briefly. 

“Do you have any medical experiences?” 

Mostly with bullet wounds, she suddenly wants to say, but she only nods instead and he points somewhere left to her. “Check on them, I'll take care of him.”

And he is gone without another word and she turns towards the direction he has pointed at, feet moving almost at their own accord. It takes ten minutes for the ambulance to arrive, and she doesn't do anything more than a few comforting words, a quick look at somebody who has cut himself and then she steps aside for the paramedics and disappears into the rainy afternoon. She has almost completely forgotten the man later that evening back at her hotel, laying on her back.

The chaos of the day is in her head and for the first time in too many years she does not automatically think about ways she could have used it for her advantage. She thinks of thankful looks instead. About hands that stopped shaking just a little bit.

She thinks of white and she thinks of a single gun shot that was a promise to herself and to her mother to never let herself get that far, to never let anything rule and overrule her life like that. 

Thinks that all she had been in those years was that gun shot and then she had been nothing.

It takes two months to safely cut all her ties, five more until she feels secure enough and has the necessary papers to enroll in a university and three more years before she is a nurse.  
She has been Mary Morstan long enough at this point for the name to not feel like a lie anymore and when a blonde doctor asks her for it one day, it comes as easy as her smile.

What comes after that is once again a blur, but this time the good kind of blur. She still fears that the sound of the gun might reappear one day, she stills dream without colors of bright red on white dresses and white shoes and she still feels that she deserves it, no matter how bright John smiles at her and now matter how much faster her heart is pounding when he does that. 

Still, she thinks she might have found the balance here and now. The balance between her past that at time still threatens to suffocate her and her present that was more than a row of meaningless visions and sounds and John is that balance.

Mary is happy.


End file.
